Word: trouper
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...performs 22 of his songs while telling his version of an entertainer's life and self-inflicted hard times. As the performance progresses, and Hank periodically darts offstage for a "glass of milk," he becomes more surly, maudlin, fatalistic. His life is crumbling; he knows it and, trouper to the end, makes a slam-bang show out of it. So does Carl Chase, who plays Williams. He does not look like Hank; he does not sound much like him. But through craft or luck or force of will, he becomes Williams. The competition is tough, but Chase is giving...
A.W.O.L. is the story of a U.S.O. troupe drafted by army intelligence to infiltrate the island hideout of the notorious traitor, Alura. Alura is an old trouper herself with a weakness for show biz, and so does not suspect that the U.S.O. troupe is really there to discover how she has managed to kidnap and hold two thousand of our G.I.'s. In usual musical fashion, the entire cast breaks down into girlfriends and boyfriends. The U.S.O. troupe consists of three couples. Alura lives with her nearly-Frankensteinian lover, Max. Even the peripheral characters travel around in twos, and then...
...Lila Kedrova, the old woman mostly seems merely gaga. It is sometimes hard to determine whether her grimaces are meant to convey joy or pain or simply the frustration of an actress trying to find a part that no one quite bothered to write out for her. The doughty trouper Melvyn Douglas, playing her husband, seems similarly afflicted. Both performers are the victims of Lee Grant's direction, which is diffident and lacks both élan and a clear viewpoint...
...jokes flowing as his world collapsed like a burlesque banana's baggy pants. On Broadway, as incarnated by Jack Lemmon, Scottie was a sympathetic soul. With the footlights acting as a DMZ between character and playgoer, Scottie could be abstracted and romanticized: he was the fatally ill trouper doing one heroic final turn...
...What's more, they rarely know how entertaining they are. Nero, for example, when he entered his Golden House with its statue of him self, 120 feet high, and its private lake, observed: "At last I am beginning to live like a human being." Who but a real trouper could have come up with a line like that...